Pindar's Eyes

This book assesses the ways in which Pindar, as well as other epinician poets, investigates the theme of aesthetic, and specifically visual, experience in early classical Greece. Major case studies offer complete readings of Pindar’s Nemean 5, Nemean 8, and Pythian 1. These poems reveal Pindar’s deep interest in the relation between lyric poetry and the material and visual world of commemorative and religious sculpture and other significant visual phenomena. The book offers an account of the reception of Pindaric themes in the Aeginetan logoi of Herodotus’ Histories and also offers new insights into Simonides’ own material-cultural interests, a fresh treatment of narrative style and material culture in Bacchylides, and a visual and material-cultural reading of Pindar’s Nemean 10. Pindar uses the concept of vision within his poetry to assess the extent to which either encomiastic poetry or sculpture can achieve its commemorative or religious purposes; this book uses current theoretical methodologies to evaluate how this is done. New claims are made about the nature of classical Greek visuality and ritual subjectivity. Literary studies of Pindar’s evocation of cultural attitudes through elaborate use of the lyric first person are combined with art-historical treatments of ecphrasis, of image and text, and of art’s framing of ritual experience in ancient Greece. Pindar uses a particularly complex and alluring poetic language to create empowering and highly valued paradigms for social, cultural, and religious subjectivity.